Al - Moderator

If you're going to go with vitamins then make sure it has both biotin and zinc.

It's a bit rough the first few months, but if all goes well you'll be getting a lot of hot, young, beautiful babes checking you out and wanting to date you after that. That's what you have to keep thinking about for the next few months 😀

It's totally normal to be nervous before a first hair transplant procedure. You don't have to worry about posting who the Dr is due to you being nervous and anxious.

This turned out really well. It looks natural and not crazy disproportionate like I've seen before. I get why you did it because I always had the belly fat problem as well where no matter how much I work out I can get my arms and legs to be rock solid, but every extra bit of fat goes right to my stomach. At the same time it's not something I ever thought about doing because even though I have the belly fat problem, it's still something that I have some control of depending on what I eat and how I exercise. My hair was always a different issue. With my hair there was never anything I could actually ever do to improve it naturally.

You will get some maturing over the next few months, so it may improve a bit, but it's never going to be super thick. It looks pretty good for the number of grafts done and it's a big improvement from where you were. You can always go back for a minor touch up to add a bit of density in another 6 months or so if you really want to, but you may be better off just enjoying the improvement for a few years and wait to see how your hair loss progresses.

Nah. It looks good. It's probably better to hold onto those potential additional 500 grafts for use later if you lose more hair. African American type of hair usually has less overall potential grafts to use than other hair types, so it's better to keep the graft count down if you can. I wouldn't do anything for a while. Enjoy your hair (and your money) for a few years until you need more in other areas. It turned out well. Hair transplants are very rarely perfect, so don't try to get to that level.

I looked at a lot of his pictures online and it looks like he may have had a very minor hair transplant along the hairline when he still had some hair there and continued to do a comb over for a couple of years until he lost the rest of the native hair.

I shave daily. I took these two pictures just now.

I've had over 2300 beard grafts taken from under my chin.

@asterix0 The first study with 112 cases, it looks like all of them were bad hair transplants to begin with. That's like one or two bad clinics performing 112 hair transplants and botching them all because they don't know what they are doing and then claiming hair transplants don't work because the hair doesn't grow well, so transplanted hair must not have donor dominance like we've heard for the past 50 years. They call it FUT, but I'm nearly positive it's actually FUE that they were doing. They called it Follicular Unit Transfer, Not Follicular Unit Transplantation. The Transfer word leads me to believe they are doing FUE punch grafts and implanting those. Your real question should be how many people who have gone to well known North American clinics that have been doing FUT for over 20 years have patients that lost most of their transplanted hair over the years. Have you ever heard of a Hasson and Wong patient from years ago come here and say their transplant from 10 or 20 years ago all fell out? No. It doesn't happen. Why is it only happening recently? Why does it happen so much more with hair mill clinics that are doing multiple FUEs a day using primarily techs? Those are where the issues are. Bad extraction and implanting techniques. Some of the hair may grow for a while, but the follicles are too damaged and eventually die out. This was an extremely rare occurrence with FUT for many years. Why is that? In your 2nd study it only claims the hair takes on characteristics of hair that grew or is growing in the area it is transplanted to. It doesn't say the transplanted hair develops a sensitivity to DHT. I sort of equate this to someone going to another country to live with a family who all have a peanut allergy or something. Eventually I will be eating more and more of the foods they eat, learning their language, learning their customs, but I'm never going to develop a peanut allergy that they have.

It depends on how far along he actually is. It looks like what you should have at around 4 months post op, so If hes only at 4 months then he could be on track.

Overall this turned out extremely well from where you started. I wonder if the slowness in the crown growth was more to do with having more beard hair placed there rather than it being the crown.

Just a comment on the first procedure: It looks to me like they charged you per hair, rather than per graft. If you figure an average of around 2.2 hairs per graft then that would give you around 1450 grafts to get 3200 hairs. The 1450 number looks to me to be about the amount of grafts that was done. It does look like most of it grew because they hardly transplanted in the center where it was still thin afterwards. It looks like you had some very thin miniaturized hair there that really needed to be transplanted into much more the way the 2nd procedure was done.

It's hard for me to say how well mine grew because it was over 25 years ago, so I really don't remember and they were placed in between already transplanted hair to thicken the area up. However over the years FUEing out old pluggy grafts and retransplanting them to make the hairline and behind it look more natural was done to many guys with those old doll head transplants. It's not done so much anymore because there aren't many pluggy transplants around anymore. There have been a couple of cases posted here recently of hairlines from Turkey that were not done right or too low and the hairline was FUEd out and replanted. I tried to do a search to find them, but I couldn't find what I was looking for. I know they are here though.

FUT is usually preferred by women because it doesn't require shaving the entire donor area and the strip scar can be easily hidden since nearly all women will never cut their hair so short that the scar will show. I think Dr Bloxham requires shaving the recipient area, but I don't know whether Dr Bernstein does. You may want to check out True & Dorin in NY as they don't require shaving the recipient area.

I think lasers do have some minimal benefit as I've used a laser comb before, but I would not spend more money to go to a clinic a few times a week than it would cost to buy a laser cap or laser comb myself and be able to use it daily at home.

Been there, done that. Years ago I had some large plug grafts removed and cut into smaller grafts and reinserted to other areas.

It's somewhat common to have thinner hair above the ears, but it's usually not so noticeable. Yours is thin just below the temple points which makes it more noticeable than usual.

You are just about at the point where growth really starts. Hang in there.

I noticed that before too. There seems to be a time limit after which you can no longer edit your posts.

Your hair looks normal to me.

Dr Umar does 2 and 3 day sessions for bigger cases.

Yep. That's when it starts on some people. There's always a range of what normal is with a lot of things. Something to look forward to, though, is if it falls out early then you may be someone who starts growing on the early side of normal too. I'm curious to find out if that's true in a few months.

I think he's auditioning for the next Hercules movie.

Be careful with oral minoxidil. It can cause some heart problems. I'd be worried about how the long term use affects the heart.